Evolution and Human Uniqueness

by Kim Sterelny

It is widely agreed that the human evolutionary story is puzzling. As both individuals and in groups, we contrast with all other large animals in our numbers, geographical spread, ecological impact, dependence on technology, and cooperation. This contrast evolved very rapidly^—^in just a few million years. Most theories of this transition identify a key a crucial adaptive change that powered the human revolution.This book develops and presents an alternative account of this transformation. Our ancestors' lifeways became dependent on high value resources. Such resources require some combination of technology, cooperation, knowledge, and skill if they are to be harvested reliability. Initially small differences in abilities to cooperate, learn socially, and use technology increased though positive feedback, allowing our ancestors to spread into new environments and new lands. By the emergence of our own species, or earlier, we had evolved the cognitive and social capacities to build information packages suitable to environments very different from our ancestral African homelands.

271 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 18, 2026

About the author

After studying philosophy at Sydney University, Kim Sterelny taught philosophy in Australia at Sydney, ANU (where he was Research Fellow, and then Senior Research Fellow, in Philosophy at RSSS from 1983 until 1987), and La Trobe Universities, before taking up a position at Victoria University in Wellington, where he held a Personal Chair in Philosophy. For a few years he spent half of each year at Victoria University and the other half of each year with the Philosophy Program at RSSS, but from 2008 he has been full-time at ANU.

Sterelny has been a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at Cal Tech and the University of Maryland, College Park, in the USA. His main research interests are Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. He is the author of The Representational Theory of Mind and the co-author of Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt) and Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (with Paul Griffiths). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In addition to philosophy, Kim spends his time eating curries, drinking red wine, bushwalking and bird watching.

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/profile/ki...